By Silvia Pasquetti

Emergent Conversation 19

This essay is part of the series PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 19 on Racism and Policing in Global Perspective

Denied national self-determination, forcibly displaced, pushed into statelessness, or granted degraded forms of citizenship, Palestinians experience state suspicion across different regions of the world. The experience of being policed by powerful military, security, and policing agencies applies in particular to Palestinians who live under Israeli rule, including those with Israeli citizenship, those who are permanent residents of East Jerusalem, those living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank, and those trapped behind fences and under ongoing Israeli military siege in the Gaza Strip.

Palestinians under Israeli rule have been reduced to objects of security since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Their ethnonational identity has been constructed and managed as a source of dangerousness through what effectively amounts to a process of racialization: a process that naturalizes “cultural differences into dissimilarities of essence,” eternalizing such assumed dissimilarities in time, and homogenizing the racialized group such that all its members are perceived “as sharing a permanent essential quality that warrants [their] differential treatment” (Wacquant 2022, 78). This racialization has a complex relational history with European racial hierarchies. For example, early Jewish Israeli leaders engaged with these hierarchies as they attempted to rationalize their relationships with Palestinian populations, either embracing (as early Zionist thinkers did) or rejecting (as Labour Zionist leaders did) the idea that their settlement in Palestine shared settler colonial characteristics similar to those of the European colonies (Ben Zeev 2021).

The racialization of Palestinians continues today underpinning, among other things, how different agencies of control define and manage them. As Anna Stoler (2016, 60-61) aptly puts it, like other colonial formations, settler colonialism is “a fractious historical condition,” “a protracted moment in colonial statecraft,” and “an imperial process in formation whose security apparatus confirms that it is always at risk of being undone.” Along these lines, different policing, security, and military practices have both driven and emerged from the broader history of denied nationhood, mass displacement, and land confiscation imposed on Palestinians. Some practices, such as the recruitment of informers, have circulated across the different legal-spatial categories imposed on Palestinians (for example, those incorporated as surveilled citizens within the Israeli state and those under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank). Other practices, for example, the use of military regulations, have coalesced around distinct segments of Palestinians at different times (for example, among Palestinian citizens of Israel from 1948 to 1966 and among Palestinians of the occupied territories since 1967).

The Israeli policing, security, and military apparatus expanded from its pre-state formation during the Nakba (literally Catastrophe in Arabic) arguably the most devastating upheaval in the modern history of the Palestinians (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007).[1] The Nakba occurred in 1948 when the Israeli state was established, and 750,000 Palestinians were displaced. Most became refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank (under Jordanian rule), and the Gaza Strip (under Egyptian rule), while 160,000 Palestinians managed to remain within the newly established state, obtaining Israeli citizenship but also experiencing dispossession and military rule.

Those Palestinians who became Israeli citizens in 1948 were placed at the bottom of ethnoracial hierarchies within the Israeli state, which also include marginalized Mizrahi Jews (Jews coming from Middle Eastern countries) and, more recently, Jews from Ethiopia (Ben Zeev 2021). The Israeli citizenship of these 160,000 Palestinians was granted to them through a census that took place during a seven-hour military curfew in November 1948 (Leibler and Breslau 2005, 880-881). One of the main concerns of the census-takers was the demographic question of how many Palestinians had remained within the Israeli territory. Only those Palestinians who were at home and thus registered in the census were given access to Israeli citizenship. All those Palestinians who were not in their homes during the military curfew were excluded from Israeli citizenship. Not only did this exclusion make permanent the mass displacement of Palestinians outside the newly established Israeli state but it also created legal paradoxes within it such as the category of “present absentees”: internally displaced Palestinians who were not registered during the census and since then have been considered “absentees” and thus prevented from returning to their lands and homes even if they have remained within the newly formed Israeli state (Schechla 2001).[2]

Citizenship for Palestinians inside Israel both expresses and disguises their distinct relationship with the settler colonial state (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022). It expresses it because it has effectively emerged from the broader history of mass displacement and societal destruction imposed on Palestinians. The Israeli citizenship regime formally discriminates against Palestinians due to their ethnonational identity in a wide range of arenas, including state budget allocation, planning, land ownership, and freedom of expression (Adalah 2017). It disguises it because Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have enjoyed voting rights since 1948 and voting rights typically resonate with global definitions of and struggles for democracy.

The settler-colonial dimension of citizenship becomes visible when one traces how Palestinians inside Israel have been first subjected to military rule between 1948-1966 (Cohen 2009), and then controlled via a securitized police state between 1966 and the present (Pasquetti 2013, 2019). This securitized system of control is underpinned by a widespread use of “security informers” recruited by the Israeli General Secret Services (GSS), the main Israeli security agency. This system conflates political repression and “national security,” effectively contributing to bifurcate Israeli policing along ethnic lines as it is implemented over Palestinians but not Jewish Israelis.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are constructed and treated as a “suspect population,” intended as an entire class of people that is targeted as “suspicious” or “dangerous” for their shared traits, in their case ethnonational membership (Cole and Lynch 2006, 39-40). Their ethnonational membership is simultaneously denied in public discourses and targeted as a potential danger in security and policing practices. Official and public discourses within Israel seek to sever their ties with Palestinian peoplehood, defining them as “Israeli Arabs,” a term that does not recognize them as a segment of the broader Palestinian national identity and history. The Israeli state also mobilizes ethnoreligious differences among them to co-opt some of them within its military apparatus. For example, unlike other Palestinians, Bedouin Palestinians can and at times do volunteer in the Israeli army mainly due to its many material benefits (Kanaaneh 2008).  Yet, at the same time, it is their membership in the broader Palestinian society that has historically been policed as “dangerous” through a variety of tools, such as security screens in the workplace, interrogations, arrests through the use of informers, and censorship (Zureik 1979; Zureik et al. 2010; Sa’di 2016). These security practices also target those groups such as Bedouin Palestinians that have some members serving in the Israeli army. Further, Israeli authorities—from judges to police officers—often attribute ethnonational motivations to criminal actions committed by Palestinian citizens (Ajzenstadt 2002). For example, Israeli police officers approach drug-dealing among Palestinian citizens as an ethnonational threat because of its perceived aim “to drug the Jewish population” (Cohen 1989, 132, quoted in Zureik 1993, 102).

The Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in 1967—what Palestinians call the Naksa (Setback)—has added another layer to the Israeli system of control. Since 1967, the Israeli army has become the main agency of control over Palestinians in these militarily occupied territories (Gordon 2008). The military occupation has produced other waves of mass displacement among Palestinians in the West Bank, both refugees from 1948 and non-refugees who had lived there before  1948.[3] The Israeli army has regularly used coercive measures introduced via military regulations–including house demolitions, curfews, administrative detention (detention without trial), roadblocks, and bans on political organizations. For example, in the early 1990s there were about 1,300 military regulations in the West Bank and about 1,000 in the Gaza Strip (Hajjar 2005, 59).

Similar to the travel permits regulating the movement of Palestinians inside Israel during the military rule (1948-1966), the permit regime introduced in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip facilitated the creation of a network of thousands of “informers” under the supervision of the GSS (Gordon 2008, 42–44; Berda 2017): the approval of permits often requires Palestinians be interviewed at one of the GSS offices established in the occupied territories after the military occupation, and during these interviews GSS officers can try to pressure Palestinians to become “informers” in exchange for granting of the permits.

The Israeli military courts have exercised personal, territorial, and extraterritorial jurisdiction over Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. About half a million (out of the four million) Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including children from the age of twelve, have been arrested and prosecuted in Israeli military courts since 1967. Hajjar notes, “Although not all Palestinians who are arrested are prosecuted in the military court system (some are released, others are administratively detained without trial), of those who are charged, approximately 90 to 95 percent are convicted” (2005, 3). Hajjar uses the term “carceralism” to define the system of Israeli military courts and prisons with jurisdiction over Palestinians of the occupied territories: carceralism “captures the fact that they [Palestinians] are treated collectively as suspected and punishable and are imprisoned, literally in that thousands or tens of thousands are in prison at any given time” (Hajjar 2005, 186).

In addition to 1948 and 1967, another eventful period in this double history—of the Palestinian people and of the agencies policing them—was the decade of 1990s, when, as a result of the First Palestinian Intifada (Uprising) against the Israeli army, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. In the last thirty years, the PA has emerged in the West Bank as an institution driven by a neoliberal project of proto-statehood through economic and urban development, especially in Ramallah city, the de facto “capital” of the PA (Clarno 2017; Rabie 2021). The PA can be conceptualized as an effective form of indirect rule similar to the ones used by colonial rulers in Africa (Mamdani 1996). A key aspect of the PA as an institution of indirect rule is its role in policing and quenching Palestinian collective mobilization in the West Bank via security coordination with the Israeli army (and U.S. and European security apparatuses) (El Kurd 2019). Further, the PA’s orientation towards urban middle classes and its policing role against street protests have combined to produce widespread resentment among Palestinians in the West Bank (Taraki 2008).

Two additional layers of control warrant analytical attention. First, the policing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem since 1967 has acquired distinct features of everyday surveillance (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015). Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, which was unilaterally annexed by the Israeli state in 1967 (unlike the adjacent West Bank that has been militarily occupied since then), have been given the status of “permanent residents.” Unlike citizenship, this status is precarious and subject to removal by the Israeli authorities. In other words, this legal status embeds a predicament of surveillance in their everyday lives, as they are routinely called to demonstrate to Israeli authorities their socioeconomic attachment to and physical presence in the city. Failing this test, they can and often are stripped of their legal status thus becoming stateless in their own city or facing a life in exile. Further, the absence of the PA and the prominent role of the Israeli police give distinct features to the system of control over Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Second, since 2007, the policing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip has radically shifted away from the PA indirect rule within the broader Israeli military occupation that still today characterizes the system of control in the West Bank. While the PA in the West Bank is dominated by Fatah, a major political faction, since 2007, Hamas, another faction, has established its government in the Strip and the Israeli state has imposed a rigid blockade around it and targeted it with repeated bombings.

What does this brief overview of the distribution of security, policing, military, and indirect rule practices over Palestinians tell us about control, race, and coloniality? Studying how control is exercised and by whom matters in my view for at least three reasons. First, the distribution of different practices of control, from the recruitment of informers to deadly militarism, along axes such as legal status and place has implications for broader political visions and mobilizations. The Palestinian populations discussed here have repeatedly expressed and acted upon their shared sense of peoplehood, most recently through the Unity Intifada in April and May 2021.[4] However, historically, they have been forced to live in proximity to different agencies of control and the practices of these agencies have often worked (in accord or friction) to reproduce and redraw the lines of division obstructing their collective efforts.

Second, studying the distribution of varied predicaments of surveillance, policing, and militarized control imposed on differently situated Palestinians can help put their predicaments in dialogue with historical and present-day cases of racialized groups constructed as “dangerous enemies” across tiers of the global order (Wacquant 2008; Browne 2015; Yonucu 2022). This global comparative perspective would benefit from including the predicament of Palestinians inside Israel (and not only of those militarily occupied) in broader conversations on colonial policing.

Third, there are implications for the mobilization of global networks of solidarity against racialized policing everywhere. For example, the 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri triggered mass protests against racial policing. These protests, which gave international profile to Black Lives Matter, made global connections with the Israeli bombings of the Gaza Strip in summer 2014. This connection between the Ferguson protests and the Gaza protests was again activated when George Floyd was murdered by the US police in 2020 (Ben Zeev 2021). However, 1967 (and not 1948) still marks global awareness of the settler colonial relationships between the Israeli state and Palestinians.[5] Excavating the history of racialized policing of Palestinians inside Israel and situating it within the broader history and structure of Israeli control from 1948 to today can rectify this truncated view.

?w=156″ alt=”” width=”156″ height=”200″ />Silvia Pasquetti is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University. She has written extensively about militarization, policing, and surveillance in contexts of forced displacement, especially among Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. She is the author of the forthcoming book Refugees Together and Citizens Apart: Control, Emotions, and Politics at the Palestinian Margins (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Notes

[1] The Jewish national movement in Palestine had established security and military forces under the British Mandate over Palestine (1918-1948). It is at this time that the Israeli security practice of recruitment of “informers” among Palestinians, which, as I discuss in this piece, continues to the present, was first introduced (Cohen 2008).

[2] The properties of Palestinian “present absentees” were put under the management of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF is an organization that has had (and still has) a key role in the formulation of” land management which discriminates against Palestinian citizens (Jiryis 1973; Forman and Kedar 2004).

[3] During the Naksa, about 400,000 Palestinians were displaced from the West Bank, half of them refugees from 1948.

[4] The Unity Intifada (Uprising) was driven by mass protests directed against the attempted removal of some Palestinian families from East Jerusalem. The protests started in East Jerusalem in April 2021 and then extended to Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.

[5] For example, Black Palestinian ties of solidarity and mobilization can be traced to the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (Erakat 2020). By contrast, in 1948, prominent Black American writers and intellectuals, for example W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright struggled to see the destruction of Palestinian society through the prism of colonialism. For example, Wright had reacted to photos of Palestinian men, women, and children displaced during the 1948 Nakba by invoking the “irrationality” of religion on both sides while Du Bois had supported the establishment of the Israeli state as the outcome of an antiracist and anticolonial struggle. Du Bois’ position toward Israel became more critical when Israel along with Britain and France invaded Egypt to retain control over the Suez Canal (Lubin 2007, 96-97).

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